European car rental comparison startup — or self-styled metasearch engine — Happycar has raised a new $1.58 million round of funding. Notable backers include Global Founders Capital, the venture arm of German startup factory and e-commerce behometh Rocket Internet. Unusually, however, GFC isn’t leading the round.
Israel’s technology scene has produced a number of successful startups in recent years, including Waze, which was acquired and exited $2.3B. US investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures have also been active in this market.
Doctolib, the Paris-based startup that helps patients find doctors and schedule appointments, has raised $20.5 million to help it expand into six new European countries.
In addition to fueling new growth, the latest investment demonstrates the kind of maturity that France’s boosters hope to see more of from its growing startup economy.
Stanislas Niox-Chateau, the company’s cofounder and current chief executive, was previously at Otium Capital. He describes Otium as France’s “Rocket Internet,” in that it was incubating and then spinning out its own startups.
Software is eating the world, but who’s setting the table? Engineers, and everyone needs them. But companies that hire freelance programmers are realizing an ugly product is as broken as buggy code. The talent crunch around engineers has now spawned a parallel desperation for designers. Toptal wants to answer that call by routing designers with spare cycles to companies in need after doing the same with engineers.
Remember when drivers talking on cell phones were annoying? OK, they still are—but at least that usually means they aren’t looking down at their screen as they plow into a bike, pedestrian, or your car.
Distracted drivers are the worst. Now they’re the target of a Boston startup that’s using—guess what—smartphones and apps to monitor drivers’ behavior and form partnerships with insurance companies. Fighting fire with fire, it seems.
Intuit,PayPal and Square already know how much money millions of small businesses are bringing in each day. Now these tech firms are stepping up efforts to mine that data to get into the lending business.
As our lives get busier, who will take care of the elderly members of our family? If you’re a fan of the on-demand economy, then Envoy might be just the thing. It’s a family concierge service for seniors and family caregivers, and today it has launched in San Antonio, now making it available in 17 markets across 7 U.S. states.
To support this massive expansion and its operations, Envoy has also raised a $3 million seed round led by SoftTech VC.
Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) staged a pretty good sendoff in San Diego yesterday for the 10 startups that began the company’s robotics accelerator program 16 weeks ago. Techstars manages the startup-mentoring program in San Diego under a corporate partnership with Qualcomm.
The wireless technology giant held its inaugural “Demo Day” for the Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator in the opulent Fairmont Grand Del Mar resort hotel. More than 400 people attended, including about 100 investors, Qualcomm officials said.
According to the CB Insights’ real time unicorn tracker there are 16 financial technology startups that have reached unicorn status, i.e. are valued at more than $1B. The aggregate valuation of all 16 of these fin tech companies equals almost $49B, which is roughly 10% of the aggregate value of all 130 unicorns as of August 27, 2015.
In 2005, I was at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi as an undergraduate. As part of a course intended to design solutions for real-life challenges, we visited the National Association for the Blind in Delhi. We heard stories of how people with blindness get hurt when out walking—abruptly hitting open windows, tree branches, or vehicles. It creates so much fear that they are reluctant to step out without assistance.
